Michael Ovitz

Co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and, for a generation, the most powerful dealmaker in Hollywood — the agent who reshaped talent representation around teamwork and packaging before a brief, turbulent spell as president of The Walt Disney Company and a second career as a technology investor.

Ovitz began in the William Morris mailroom, alongside future moguls David Geffen and Barry Diller, and in 1974 co-founded CAA from card tables with no capital. He built it into the industry’s dominant agency by inverting its conventions: multiple agents per client rather than one, an internal ethic of honesty and information-sharing, and the assembling of scripts, directors, and stars into ready-made ‘packages’ such as The Natural and Jurassic Park. After leaving CAA he served as president of Disney (1995–97), then moved full-time into technology investing and incubation from the early 2000s. His memoir, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, gathers the lessons — and the mistakes — he now most likes to be asked about.

Core positions

Ovitz treats knowledge as power that works for you only if embraced and indexed for context, and honesty as a competitive edge in a business built on flattery. He prizes teamwork over the lone operator, momentum as the master variable in any endeavour, and loyalty as the durable asset that outlasts power — which he dismisses as ephemeral and fleeting, ‘like a lease’. His signature craft is packaging: combining disparate elements into a whole, an act he holds to be identical whether the elements are a film’s or a start-up’s. He reads founders and talent for passion, depth, openness to critique, and the absence of arrogance, and reframes failure, in an American key, as a badge of honour rather than a source of shame.

In the wiki

• Michael Ovitz on Power, Dealmaking, and Building CAA — building CAA from the mailroom, information as power, loyalty and reading people, packaging, and the psychology and costs of power